➤ Battle Souls, the review 🎮

Battle Souls catapult us into a disturbing fantasy scenario, a world abandoned by the gods and plunged into darkness, where men and villages are at the mercy of hordes of demonic creatures. A group of adventurers decides to go into the mountains, looking for a passage that could guarantee them access to new places, but the task is not the simplest: to get to their destination you have to overcome four different scenarios, each characterized by winds missions gradually more complex, available in three degrees of difficulty. New title for iOS and Android from the Spanish team Talesoft Studio, Battle Souls uses mechanisms RPG strategic and a turn-based combat system to put us from time to time in front of different gatherings of enemies, during a fairly long but inevitably repetitive campaign.

The game clearly refers to the excellent Darkest Dungeon, but fails to grasp its atmosphere or depth, greatly simplifying the gameplay and transforming the clashes into a simple exchange of blows between characters with different values in terms of health, stamina and attack capacity. The strength of the experience lies precisely in the large roster of warriors, archers, soldiers armed with cannons, thieves and wizards that can be summoned using the precious currency of the game and inserted into the four slots that make up the team. Each of them boasts some peculiarities, such as zone maneuvers that inflict damage to multiple targets or precision hits from a distance, the ability to heal companions or to cast curses. In short, composing the strongest possible team represents the key to success, and it must be said that from this point of view the game does not mind releasing high-level units completely free, asking in return only a few seconds of patience at the end. of each boss fight to watch short advertisements.

Gameplay and structure

The main screen of Battle Souls contains in an interesting way the various sections that can be controlled between one mission and another: the portal for the summons we have already mentioned, the management of the team (not always very clear when the characters begin to become many), the achievements available (in the form of tasks to be completed to obtain a reward) and of course the list of missions, divided as mentioned between four different settings for a total of eighty internships, each available in three degrees of difficulties. Going from the lowest to the highest level obviously results in stronger and more resilient enemies, pitfalls that occur more frequently but also better rewards in the end.

The exploration of the stages takes place according to a style scheme dungeon two-dimensional, in which you have to move the "pawn" that represents the team and face random events from box to box, for example suffering injuries due to an unexpected trap or being faced with the dilemma of looting a body or giving it a worthy burial. The encounters are therefore regulated by a random system, and when the team encounters a group of enemies the view takes on the characteristics of a contrast to the Darkest Dungeon, in fact, with the fighters on one side and the other who in turn unleash the own hits (from a shortlist of three possible actions, at least initially) until the enemies are all eliminated.

The obstacle course continues until the last square, that of the boss fight, where we will face even more formidable opponents and then return to the base with the loot ... or in a coffin. In reality, the mix of generous drop and low difficulty makes the first twenty missions of Battle Souls quite trivial and you have to wait a long time for the situation to become a bit more eventful, but the limitations of the gameplay and the consequent repetition of the situations could make you let go early, despite the lack of constraints related to the mechanisms freemium. The pixel art graphics are certainly fascinating, but very lacking in terms of animations, which are limited to very few frames. The game is also not optimized for the iPhone X display, and so it happens to see in the sidebands elements and assets that should have remained hidden.

Comment

Tested version iPhone (1.0.9) Digital Delivery App Store, Google Play Price Free Resources4Gaming.com

7.0

Readers (3)

7.6

Your vote

Battle Souls is a strategic RPG characterized by a fascinating setting, rendered fairly well by the pixel art graphics and the abundance of different characters, each with unique abilities and characteristics. The game's campaign, composed for the moment of eighty missions on four scenarios, involves progressively more complex challenges but tend to be too similar due to a simple and limited gameplay, which does not include many variables and generally rewards the strongest team, without surprises. In short, changing the components of the party and unlocking the achievements is an interesting practice, which tends to lose inspiration after a few hours.